Last Updated on April 9, 2017 by Mathew Diekhake
The Sony Xperia series are receiving Android 5.0 Lollipop at the beginning of next year. We already know the only manufacturer of smartphones to have it to date is Motorola. We knew they were close with the folks out of Mountain View since they were a Google company before becoming a part of Lenovo. 5.0 Lollipop comes in factory images, direct OTA downloads, OTA files and Android Open Source project otherwise known as AOSP.
The difference with AOSP and official Android ROM is they are developed by third-party developers and not the official ones from Google or Sony. That means what you have here is an artificial custom ROM that is designed to mimic much of what you will get from Lollipop. That’s the best any Xperia owners can ask for until 2015 comes. Once we roll into the new years from the celebrations you can take a second to think about Lollipop coming for your handsets since it’s coming during January.
Android Lollipop comes with a Material Design UI, Priority Mode, lock screen notifications, Battery saving mode, multiple users menu, new Quick Settings toggles, screen pinning, device sharing, final Android Runtime (ART), different Google Now and OpenGL ES 3.1. You’ll find all of that inside the AOSP. You should understand that many of the official applications from the Google Play Store must be updates to work with material design before they show with the new feature.
As you know, XDA Developers hosts thousands of threads and a place where developers love to hang out and post their work. The work we have here today comes directly from them, as member krabappel2548 is the brains behind the ROM.
Being a custom ROM and not an official ROM we don’t urge anybody install it on their daily phone. You should prefer installing it on a secondary phone. That’s particularly true if you work and have a job where you use the phone. We know official releases come with bug and require updates. Consider this version worse off than an official version that is worked on by countless people .
Since this is a custom ROM you ought to have root access before coming here. You’ll find guides on site or from Google to help you with unlocking the system internals. Rooting is your gateway to installing custom ROMs, custom recoveries and more applications found on the Google Play Store that you won’t use unless you’ve unchained the smartphone. Some of our favorites include Root Call Blocker, Virtual Button Bar, Dual Mount SD Widget, LBE Privacy Guard, Hexamob Recovery Pro, Total Commander, Boot Manager and Sixasis controller.
The guide is for advanced user who have experience with using Android SDK. You must have Android SDK pre-installed. The guide does not come with the SDK installation guide. We will tell you what you need to do with SDk with our files and how to do that.
A backup is a must unless you want to lose data and the current ROM. Take a Nandroid backup of the ROM so you don’t lose it. After that it’s time to download the Titanium app from the Google Play Store. Unlike Helium, Titanium is for those with root access. Now backup the SMS texts, pictures, videos, music, call logs, EFS folder, phone contacts and any other data you don’t want to lose.
Seeing as you already unlocked the internal hardware away from the default factory restrictions, you already voided the warranty anyway. Nevertheless, all custom ROMs void the warranty too. You can revert back to a stock Android experience and have it the way it was out of the box and the warranty works again. Just make sure there’s time remaining on the warranty in question since they don’t last forever. Times vary depending on the country you are residing.
Make sure you have 50% battery power remaining on the battery icon if you know USB charging isn’t working. USB charging powers the battery by default once plugged into the computer. However, it doesn’t always work. If you know it doesn’t work on your machine you want to turn the device on and look at the battery icon from the status bar. Charge the battery according either from the phone charger in the wall or plugged into the computer.
You should be familiar with SDK or ADB using a computer. Therefore, you must have a computer or laptop to complete the steps. A notebook works well so long as it has the USB slot mounted in the side. We must have a USB slot for connecting with.
You must stopover at the Developer Options and enable USB Debugging mode just like you do from any other guide. Furthermore you also want the latest USB drivers. You can verify if they are working by connecting to the computer and seeing if you can get access to the phones data. If you can there’s no need to download any drivers again.
Those of you with Android security applications such as antivirus want to temporarily disable them. Moreover, those with antivirus and other security programs on the Windows PC want to disable them until you finish the steps.
How to install AOSP Android 5.0 Lollipop on the Sony Xperia Z3
- Start by turning the computer on and logging into your account.
- Download the AOSP ROM here.
- Download the Android L Google Gapps package here.
- Transfer the .img file over to the Android SDK.
- Open up the SDk folder and right-click the mouse on the blank white space.
- Choose to open up the Windows command prompt.
- Find the Xperia Z3 and enter bootloader mode.
- Find the USB wire.
- Connect the phone to the computer with the USB wire.
- Type “fastboot flash boot boot.img” in the command prompt. Press enter on the keyboard.
- Type “fastboot flash system system.img”. Press enter.
- Disconnect the USB wire safely by stopping the USB mass Storage Device from the system tray.
– right-click the USB icon and select “safely remove hardware”. - Enter the Z3 in recovery mode.
- Navigate to “install zip from SD card” followed by “choose zip from SD card”.
- Pluck out the Gapps pack and confirm the upload.
- Go back and select “wipe cache partition,” “wipe data factory reset” and “wipe dalvick cache”.
– the dalvick is optional but recommended. - Go back and “reboot system now.”